Q: Hey Peter, I was wondering if you could make a book
recommendation. I was wondering if you
knew a book about Saints or other people (any religion, non-religious, etc.)
and their lives, beliefs and motivations.
I think they must be some of the most interesting people I have heard
of.
A: I love the saints, and I am fascinated by them as well. I suspect that my interest in them is similar
to the interest that an aspiring athlete has to a great professional athlete
who has excelled in their sport. I take
seriously the statement that “We are all called to be saints”, and hope to be
one myself (though this has been my hope for 18 years now, and I certainly have
not come close to that goal so far. I just have to trust in God’s mercy and
grace and continue to hope!)
That said, most of the books I know about saints are
biographies that share their inspiring stories, or maybe some theological
treatises which outline their beliefs…
but I don’t know of very many books that delve into their inner workings
and motivations! The one book that comes
to mind is “The fulfillment of all desire” by Ralph Martin, which is a book
that I would highly recommend to any Catholic who wants to enter into the
depths of prayer, but it is hardly a beginners book for someone who is not
Catholic!
If people reading this blog have any recommendations, I
would be happy to pass them on to the questioner!
Maybe someone should write a book. Whenever I think that, I think “Maybe I should write a book”, but then that
book idea has to fall into the cue of ideas behind the books I want to write on
simplicity and on the rosary and stations and the novels I want to write.
But were I to write a book, I would likely tackle it
something like this;
Outline the major motives and themes of the Saints, then
throw some fascinating stories into the book that illustrate these points. I think the major motives for the saints are
union with God, love and humility. Maybe
also self improvement, but I actually think that is just a cynical observation
of what saints are doing, and probably not the motive of real saints. Actually the book may need a whole section debunking the false motives that cynical people ascribe to the saints!
There seems to be a set of assumptions regarding
motivations, which maybe go back to Freud’s idea that every action is motivated
either by a desire for sex or for power.
The assumption that a lot of people have is that there must be a selfish
motive for everything we do. So why do
people have children? For a sense of
fulfillment or joy or whatever- for some selfish reason. The idea that there is any altruistic motive
for doing anything is for many people a foreign concept.
This question came to me on Facebook just as I was sitting down
to watch “The Drop Box”, a movie about a pastor in South Korea who put a box in
the wall of his church where girls and women who felt they had to abandon their
babies could abandon them anonymously but the baby would still be cared
for. The pastor has taken in hundreds
of babies, and passed them on to various organizations, but he and his wife are
now raising 15 children themselves, many with serious handicaps.
Why would he do that?
Again cynical people seem to think the only answer has to be a selfish
one- that he must be seeking attention or glory or be trying to ease his
hurting conscience or something. But I
suspect that he’s doing it for love.
I have on occasion done things purely out of love. At those
moments, I have sensed what it must be like to be a saint. There is a sense of fulfillment and purpose and freedom in doing these things.
However, no one would do it for that sense- at least not to the degree that the
saints do it!
One day a man watching Mother Teresa as she cared for the
sick and the poor said “You couldn’t pay me enough to do what you do.” Mother Teresa looked at him and said “Me neither.”
What motivates Mother Teresa or Pastor Lee of Korea or Fr
Damien who lived with the lepers in Hawaii?
None of the selfish explanations suffice for these
people. So there must be something else.
The Christian idea is that we were made originally to
love. (People even try to pin selfish
motives on God, and ask “Why did God make us?” as if there must have been some
sort of selfish motive. But he made us simply to love us!). We were designed for love with each other and
with our creator. But we chose selfishness,
sin, and chaos. And so now most of our desires are tainted by those
things. But Jesus’ death on the cross,
the ultimate selfless act, was so that we could be restored to our original
condition. God does not just
declare us holy, but rather he makes us holy, sanctifies us, which is a process
which takes time and effort and cooperation with God’s grace.
Maximilian Kolbe said that sainthood is when your will is in
perfect alignment with God’s will. You want precisely the thing that God
wants. You are motivated entirely by
love, and not by selfishness. And the third point is of course that you do not
want attention or glory, because you want humility, which underpins everything
you do. That’s why I say that even self
improvement cannot be the real motive, since this turns into a form of
narcissism.
I also think this illustrates an error that we make in
Christianity when we evangelize- we try
to promote our religion by the joy and satisfaction and meaning we find in it,
or by a longing for Heaven, or some people will even employ a fear of Hell. But
we promote a philosophy that is fundamentally selfless by appealing to
selfishness! Jesus on the other hand
invited people to take up his cross, to suffer, to serve, to give, to love, to die. I suspect that even if someone does not agree
with the Christian propositions, we all feel a certain resonance in the call to
holiness. This is precisely why
Christianity is ‘good news’ and offers hope.
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